Discussion: Where did you get the lidar

Was is already available somewhere or did you have it flown

The town of Amherst paid to have the town done, and of course it went beyond the borders enough to cover this area (but not the south side of the range). And they are happy to share the data, no charge. In fact the guy was delighted someone was interested.

Interesting. There is something called the Northeast Lidar Project that will include much of the eastern half of MA but won't get over to your area. Here is a map of what is supposed to happen if anyone is curious.
http://www.mass.gov/mgis/LiDAR_projectMapApril2011...

Not over here, but I think that covers a lot of orienteering terrain, either current of possibly future.

carl -- anything for VT?

Chittenden county has lidar in VT. But that is all I have been able to find. In Mass, we have a boston set, and the amherst set. There has been talk of a set of flights that will cover the entire new england coast, but not very far inland.

Yes, Chittenden County has lidar and I have been grabbing chuncks and using if for base maps which we have used for training. That lidar isn't that good but is a whole lot better than anything else readily available.

Oddly enough, I've seen indications that Essex county (extreme northeast county), has some recent lidar. Can only guess it has to do with the Connitecut river watershed cause there isn't much else up there.

Oh yes, Essex County. All those people in Lewis, Warners Grant and Averys Gore must be clamoring for up to date maps.

Essex County. Heh, heh, heh. Well how about that? If you know what I mean. (And you probably don't.) Seems to me there must be somebody up there...

Apparently Essex Co Vt was selected as one of the pilot areas of a USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service modernization project of the national soils survey. Here's a short paper on the subject. Interesting that they determined that 1m lidar is required to meet some of their needs, which is a higher standard than the FEMA 1.4m requirement and is much better for O basemapping. So write your congressperson and encourage support for the national soils mapping effort! Not sure why Essex was chosen specifically, but probably had to do with the specific geology or maybe existing soil surveys for agriculture and silviculture there.

Also ran across a reference to data for Franklin Co Vt (in addition to Essex and Chittenden) in one of the papers, but haven't been able to find any more info about it online.

Well, yes there are people in Essex Cty....6394 a couple years ago.

I sped-read that as 6934 years ago...

and how many are left now?